'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story' Review: Netflix Drama Series

For 35 minutes in the middle of its nine-episode run, Netflix Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez do something special.

The fifth installment, titled “The Hurt Man,” was written by series co-creator Ian Brennan and directed by Michael Uppendahl. It's a one-shot conversation between Erik Menendez (Cooper Koch) and his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor). The camera begins several feet behind Abramson and zooms in on Erik as he recalls his history of sexual abuse at the hands of his tyrannical father José (Javier Bardem).

It’s a stunt, but the whole show is a stunt, so why quibble? The writing is precise, uncomfortably explicit and disturbing. The formal simplicity serves its purpose, creating breathless tension and putting the spotlight on Koch, who is emotionally stripping away. We see the impact that the expurgation of these memories is having on Erik, and because we can’t see Abramson’s face, we hear through her voice that she is even more moved.

Viewers should be as shocked by this tale as Abramson, but the drama simultaneously leaves a modicum of doubt about the veracity of the nightmarish memory. Erik was, as we’ve been told before and will be told again and again, an aspiring actor who once proved his bona fides with an impassioned Shakespearean monologue. There’s no concrete suggestion that Erik is lying, but if you’re predisposed to thinking of him as a master manipulator, this segment won’t dissuade you.

Anything monsters seemingly wants to do — balancing layers of skepticism with a desire for empathy — is captured in that one exceptional episode and, maddeningly, only in brief moments and performances elsewhere. In many ways, it's similar to how Dahmer – Monster: The Story of Jeffrey DahmerAlso created by Brennan and Ryan Murphy, it stated that it was not intended to be an exploitative portrayal of the infamous serial killer, but it only showed something other than a voyeuristic look halfway through the season with “Silenced” and “Cassandra.” Most of the rest of the series was well-acted garbage.

I do not believe monsters it's blatantly trashy as Monster. But it is unjustifiably long, nine hours, and closes with two chapters that are poorly structured, thematically flat, and much, much more one-sided in their approach to the Menendez brothers and their professed victimhood and guilt than might seem convincing.

For those who don't remember the case or the 2017 NBC miniseries Law & Order – True Crime or any of the countless other documentaries and news magazine features on the subject: In 1989, Live Entertainment CEO José Menendez and his wife Kitty (Chloë Sevigny) were brutally murdered in their Beverly Hills mansion. Their sons Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik initially claimed to have returned home to the bloody crime scene, pointing to a possible mob hit.

Under bizarre circumstances involving their possibly unlicensed psychologist (Dallas Roberts' Dr. Oziel), the brothers confessed to the murders. Under different bizarre circumstances involving Oziel's crystal-loving lover (Leslie Grossman's Judalon), the confessions became public knowledge. The Menendez brothers were arrested and became world famous.

The media circus surrounding the brothers, the crime, and their trial erupted around Erik and Lyle's claims that they had been sexually abused and assaulted by their father, that they had killed him to protect their own life and had killed their mother because of her complicity.

As far as trials of the century go, it was OJ before OJ easily usurped it. Indeed, the football star turned murder suspect has a small role as part of the series’ completely ineffective effort to make some sort of sweeping observation about law and order in 1990s Los Angeles. However, simply mentioning OJ Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Rodney King, and Zsa Zsa Gabor is not the same as constructing a meaningful thesis. monsters does much better with the cheesy, kitschy pop culture of the time, with Reebok Pumps, Milli Vanilli, and an anachronistic montage of Vanilla Ice playing key roles.

Murphy probably shouldn't have returned in such close geographical and temporal proximity to the horrendous The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story — and, in fact, the two shows have many points of overlap, all in favor Story of an American Crime.

But what's more confusing, honestly, is how Netflix's Ryan Murphy and FX's Ryan Murphy allowed Monsters: The Story of Lyle and Erik Menendez AND American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez for the first time within two days of each other. Placed directly next to each other, these two dramas about the intersection of wealth, celebrity, murder, and sexual abuse (with overtones of repressed homosexuality) offer similar attempts at structural flexibility, similarly sly approaches to their doomed, extraordinarily muscular antiheroes, and similarly bloated running times, the kind that only someone with Murphy's clout could afford.

The best thing I can say about this double release is that it looks monsters It made me appreciate it more American Sports Historywith his scathing critique of how the NCAA and NFL exploit the aggression of young men, turn it into profit, and then throw men and their violence back into society.

monsters is less nuanced. It often becomes a crass wobble of credulity that, depending on the moment, risks downplaying two brutal deaths or a decade of molestation, all in the name of rehashing a case that’s been rehashed extensively over the years. I think it’s possible to make a show with this title and treat the identity of the eponymous real monsters as something ambiguous and fungible. Indeed, I think “The Hurt Man” does that well, and the two episodes around it — the Paris Barclay-directed “Kill or Be Killed” and the Max Winkler-directed “Don’t Dream It’s Over” — have beats that will leave viewers appropriately conflicted. The heavier opening and closing entries, however, work neither as exercises in complex storytelling nor as period thrillers.

Above all, monsters just trying to have it both ways, or, really, more than two “ways.” Are the siblings the monsters? The parents? Are we the monsters for obsessing over cases like this? Are journalists and storytellers like Dominick Dunne, well played by Nathan Lane, the monsters for feeding off these narratives and too often dehumanizing the people involved even when they know better?

And where does that leave Ryan Murphy and his frequent collaborators, who churn out so many stories of this type that the overlap is inevitable and future topics are already lined up for years to come? I don't think so. monsters he is confronted with his own complicity, and is much weaker precisely because of this lack of introspection.

At least the acting is good?

Bardem is terrifying in a performance that’s wildly over-the-top but offers enough subtlety to position his howling patriarch as both a chilling villain and a victim himself, perhaps just a cog in cycles of abuse that may be the saga’s deepest tragedy. I don’t think the show “gets” Kitty at all, but in Sevigny’s inscrutable performance, that’s part of the point. Kitty has become a footnote in a horrific story, and that at least feels sad.

Chavez is the more fiery of the two titular brothers, and he plays Lyle with an intensity that sometimes explodes off the screen, occasionally in ways that are intentionally quite funny. But Koch is the real revelation, and “The Hurt Man” should have him in the running for an Emmy nomination next summer.

I also really liked Graynor, whose growing frustration and growing uncertainty as the case dragged on became one of the few things I actually appreciated about the final episodes. If anything, she's much more natural as a curly-haired lawyer named “Abramson” than Edie Falco was in the NBC miniseries.

Over nine grueling hours (and I'm not just saying that because I watched the entire season in one day, as no screeners were provided to critics), monsters raises a lot of provocative questions. Yet all it ultimately lingers on is, “it's often hard to know the truth,” illustrating its point by staging and re-staging key moments in the timeline. I get that. I just don't think it's done intelligently or in a way that offers any enlightenment.

As Lyle's lawyer, played by Jess Weixler, observes of his client, “It's not that I don't believe those stories are true. It's like I don't believe the way he tells them.”